Ask HN: List of biggest software companies by lines of code | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: List of biggest software companies by lines of code

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Anyone compiled a list of largest software companies with their total lines of code? (Or any other metric)

microsoft: in 2017, the Windows git repo contained ~3.5 million files & used 300GB when checked out as a git repo [1], In 2020, the Office git repo contained ~3 million files [2].

facebook: In 2011, the main site had around 9.2 million lines of code "excluding numerous backend services" [3]. In 2014 the android codebase was 4 million lines of code and the main site without backend code was 62 million lines of code [3]. In 2014, when facebook were talking about scaling mercurial, the main source repo was described as "many times larger than even the Linux kernel, which checked in at 17 million lines of code and 44,000 files in 2013". Around 2018 (?) facebook started using "eden", a fork of mercurial [5].

If we make the working assumption that expected lines-of-code / file of 2013 linux kernel is representative of all repos, then that gives around 386 lines-of-code / file.

loc(microsoft) >= loc(windows in 2017) + loc(office in 2020) ≈ 386 loc / file * (3.5m + 3m) ≈ 2.5 billion lines of code

The linked blog posts from microsoft & facebook talking about scaling version control systems are fairly interesting!

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-o... [2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/introducing-scalar/ [3] https://www.quora.com/How-many-lines-of-code-is-Facebook [4] https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/scaling-mercurial-at-fa... [5] https://github.com/facebookexperimental/eden

Huh, I thought I used too many files. Surprising to see Office have 3 million files.

I have to imagine that IBM leads, given its longevity and all that COBOL out there running financial software. One of Richard Gabriel's essays--admittedly from about 30 years ago--said that in LOC, COBOL has a massive lead over all other languages. And then there's all the code to keep the OSes running.

If you mean closed source companies, most sadly are, then that data isn't available. For open source, you can do a query with GitHub API.

Yip, I meant all the big companies like Google vs Microsoft vs IBM etc.

Still, we have little information and the rest is guesswork. Articles about Google's monorepo say that it had around 2 billion lines in 2016. Should be much higher now. And there's no chance that anyone at IBM knows how many lines of code they have.

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